Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In this Cloud Wars Minute, I review the recent Oracle Q4 earnings call, where Larry Ellison gave a pretty good idea of where the company is headed with a to-do list.
Highlights
00:30 — Ellison shared that Oracle will be the number one cloud database company, the number one cloud applications company, and the number one builder and operator of cloud infrastructure data centers in the world — more than all of its competitors combined, including Microsoft, Google, and AWS.
01:07 — While Oracle is still stuck in the on-prem database world, as most of its clients are still there, the company is starting to move fairly aggressively to the cloud. Additionally, it has several deployment options. On the earnings call, both Ellison and CEO Safra Catz said that the database business, especially the cloud database business, is on fire right now.
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01:38 — Oracle’s apps business is, in the annualized space, somewhere between $11 billion to $12 billion, while SAP and Salesforce are in the $40 billion range. Salesforce is all in the cloud, while some of SAP is on-prem. Both Ellison and Catz said they will do this with applications. In the past, we’ve seen that it’s not smart to bet against Larry Ellison.
02:12 — I think Ellison was careful not to say that Oracle is going to be the largest cloud infrastructure provider. Rather, he flipped it over to Oracle having more data centers than other providers. This is becoming a more critical point for its customers.
03:07 — After receiving a question from an analyst, Ellison detailed how each layer of cloud infrastructure, applications, and databases helps strengthen each of the others. There is definitely a unique strategy at play here.
